


Moths

by indevan



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: M/M, Purple Prose, Stream of Consciousness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-13
Updated: 2016-01-13
Packaged: 2018-05-13 17:25:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5710855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indevan/pseuds/indevan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He was a moth--white, flickering--getting too close to the light.  Burned.  But what’s the alternative?  Moths die in a week and he would rather be lit aflame than suffocate.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Moths

**Author's Note:**

> I found this tiny ficlet I wrote a couple months ago and I liked it so here we are. Also this is somehow the first fic I'm posting about my overall Top Ship in KNB and it's barely 500 words

Sometimes he thinks he did it to himself.  He was a moth--white, flickering--getting too close to the light.  Burned.  But what’s the alternative?  Moths die in a week and he would rather be lit aflame than suffocate.

He remembers the first light: soft and new.  Touching him like silk, resting on his bones like pearls.  Filling him and making him whole, giving him purpose.  But dawn is fleeting.  The sun rises and bleaches the sky to a white-blue.  Searing heat in a cloudless sky.  That’s him.  Burning too bright and too fast.  His shadow dark and elongated.  Then higher and higher until the shadow is gone.  Tucked shamefully under his feet in burning brightness.

Then the third.  The warmth of a late afternoon sun from the land of glitz and glamor he had only heard about.  Of spiked trees that shot straight up into the sky and handprints of dead stars in cement.  A California sunset, he thinks.  Bright orange and burning with a halo of smog as it slips below the horizon.  Comforting and new at once.  Drenching his world and him, filling his veins with sunshine and reflecting back on him into a new, whole image.

Before there was the wanting, the feeling of losing blood.  Walking on his shadow in the heat of the others: the pure incandescence of their abilities.  He could see the hunger in his face.  Washed out with dark circles under his eyes.  Veins standing out around his mouth, in his hands, as blue as his hair.  And there he was.

Teeth chewing meat and bread, swallowing burgers almost whole.  He learns he’s never satisfied, always hungry and not only for food.  He tells him about the big white letters of the Hollywood sign.  About surfing in Zuma and the grilled meat and gasoline smell of the city.  Of smog that made playing street ball hard but that it used to be even worse.  He doesn’t, though, tell him about the other boy that was there.  He tells him his ambition that can be molded to his.  Pushed further to save them because he thought he could.  Because he thought he was right.

But memories do not fade.  A boy like a rocket, blazing high and discarding parts of himself as he breaks the atmosphere.  But he’s flying high, too, fluttering little moth boy.  Drawn to light that sparkles and hypnotizes.  A boy like a rocket and a boy from across the sea.

Two jungle cats pacing around one another, tails flicking and ears flat against their skulls.  Storm fronts about to collide, trapping in him in the middle.  But he wants it.  He wants them to lunge at him, fangs bared and claws out.  They would either maul him or eat from his hand, lay their heads in his lap.  The storms washing over him, tearing him apart.

He knows it’s treacherous to want them both and maybe that’s why he’s punished.  Noon and sunset cannot exist at once.  Storms destroy.  Cats devour.

He was a moth, fluttering and flickering, before they came.


End file.
